Note taking is practised by an enormous number of individuals, in the personal, educational, and professional spheres. Individuals keep personal diaries to record events in their lives. Students take notes in classrooms and lecture halls which they later may amend and review in preparation for examination on that subject matter. Executive workers take notes in meetings to record action events and prepare to-do lists. Scientists write notes in laboratory notebooks to record experimental methods and results.
Despite the availability of portable computers, the majority of people still use paper notebooks. The free-form input allowed by paper notebooks, along with their general versatility and simplicity, means that they remain a preferred option. However, the information contained in a paper notebook is of course not integrated with digital data and is therefore very inflexible to subsequently use. In particular, it is very difficult to find specific information in such notebooks, as they must be searched manually. Further, there is no means of automatically recording when an entry was made, known as ‘timestamping’ of an entry.
Computer systems allowing the real-time capture, the storage and the retrieval of manuscript notes are already known. Such systems allow users to ‘write’ on a notepad computer, the computer capturing and recording the information and using character recognition algorithms if appropriate to convert the handwritten text to electronic text. If required, each input stroke may be timestamped, in order to log that particular input and to aid retrieval. However, such systems have not generally enjoyed widespread use, at least partly because note takers still prefer the simplicity and flexibility of paper notebooks.
The present invention has as its object to address the need for a more functional note taking method and system than hitherto provided by conventional paper notebooks, whilst avoiding the drawbacks inherent in the known or contemplated electronic notebook approaches.